El Museo Del Barrio
Style, texture, and whimsy aren't exactly what you'd be obsessing over if you were an artist that just escaped from one of Latin America's strife ridden countries. Your immediate need to release anguish, express deep seated emotions, and share your jagged perceptions of life would take precedent. El Museo Del Barrio's current exhibit: Arte ≠ Vida, Actions by Artists of the Americas 1960-2000 gives artists an open forum to do just that. A veritable collage of military dictatorships, civil wars, disappearances, invasions, brutality, censorship, civil rights struggles, immigration issues, discrimination, and economic turmoil embody each work on display. Not merely artifacts or paintings displayed in a gallery, these pieces are performative, using video and pictures challenging the traditional concept that art is equivalent to life, and life is art. Instead, inequalities and conflict are brought to the surface demonstrating that real life endured under actual repression doesn't compare to art for art's sake.
Divided into four major decades, Arte ≠ Vida represents several themes often crossing national boundaries. 1960-1970 focuses on destructivism best exemplified by one piece consisting of a skeletal sofa without its customary stuffing or fabric; 1970-1980 exposes political protest, class struggle, happenings, land/body relationships and border crossings (one female artist covers her naked body with chicken blood & then writhes around in a pile of feathers); 1980-1990 examines anti-dictatorship protest and dreamscapes; and the 1990-2000 pieces are replete with multiculturalism, postmodernism, and endurance. An additional section highlights some actions artists have carried out on television over the past 20 years. Notable is a film showing broken white lines on a highway being made into crosses under cover of night.
Every Saturday until May 18th, free tours begin at 1 p.m. examining the backgrounds of these Latino artists from the United States, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Central and South America, and giving valuable insight into the specific context behind their works.